hmmm, not sure about that. current specs on camry hybrid: 199ft. lbs. of torque on a curb weight of 3680lbs. a hypothetical accord hybrid with 1.8l ima system would be: 204ft. lbs. of torque and a curb weight less than the current 3,500 (since the engine block on a 4 cylinder will be less weight than the current 6 cylinder). that means more torque and less weight than the camry.

btw, i got 204 ft-lbs. of torque by add the 76 ft-lbs. of the electric motor to the 128 ft-lbs. on the existing 1.8l ivtec engine.

ok. i can't argue with what your personal experience is. but, going by the database here i'm simply saying that the mpg results for the hch and prius are relatively comparable. that's all.

do agree that hsd in prius delivers superior performance in the area of acceleration. that's pretty much undisputed.

The problem with the database, and the point I was trying to make, is that the only reliable results come from the same people driving both cars, not completely different sets of people driving the cars. So I used my own experience along with that of various publications, where usually the same people that drove one hybrid also drove the other, so I view their results as reliable.

My results are consistent, although they only reflect one style of driving of course. I remember one test in which I started the car when the engine was dead cold, and drove home, accelerating gently, coasting when I can, but mostly going on the highway at 79-80 miles per hour (I wanted it precise for comparison purposes).

The highway route was mostly uphill for 10 miles or so, and even though the hill is gentle most of the time, my HCH suffers: it got 33.3 mpg over the 16-mile route to my apartment. A Prius, driven the same way, engine cold, got 40.0 mpg. And the Prius was a rental so technically it might have done 41-42 mpg if I'd inflated the tires more.

warning a dead horse is about to be beaten...

the only reliable results come from a *controlled* test. one where all variables are precisely controlled, not just the driver. lacking one, even small variations lead to fairly large deviations. deviations of 10% or more are not unusual. saying you drove the two cars in exactly the same manner may be true. but, there are other factors that will affect your results: the route, light timing, road conditions, traffic, temperature, humidity, tire pressure, engine wear, electrical load, oil type, oil condition, type of pavement, head winds, cross winds, etc. all need to be controlled and the same. if they're not, comparative results are virtually meaningless. take head or cross wind for example, even a slight cross wind during a portion of the "test" will have a noticeable affect on comparative mpg. cross wind is not something you or anyone else has control over when driving the car outdoors. if you want to see just how much cross wind alone can affect mpg, there's an excellent prius calculator that shows you at:

http://privatenrg.com/#WindBigDeal

from this report, you can see that an imperceptible 8mph cross-wind can affect the mpg in a simulated (read: controlled) test by more than 10mpg. and that's just one variable. there are dozens of such variables and most of them you have no control over.

my point is: lacking a controlled test, the standard deviation for aggregate data (aka, this database and others) tends to be minimized because variations in all the variables tend to cancel themselves out across comparative samples. therefore avg. results are more reliable. that's a simple statistical truth.

okay, the horse is now dead.